Throughout the history of the church, monastic movements have emerged to explore new ways of life in the abandoned places of society. School(s) for Conversion is a communal attempt to discern the marks of a new monasticism in the inner-cities and forgotten landscapes of the Empire that is called America.

Chapter 1 – Mark 1: Relocation to Abandoned Places of Empire by Sr. Margaret M. McKenna can be found here.

About Rutba House

The Rutba House is an experiment in the new monasticism—one of many that are being conducted in towns and cities across the country. Some of these we knew about before coming to Durham. Many we didn’t. But we are excited to learn more all the time of ways in which the Spirit is moving to address the social crisis we feel when we talk to our neighbors or read the morning paper. We are encouraged by the Catholic Worker Movement, the Bruderhof communities, Shalom Mission Network, Word and World Alternative Seminary, the Ekklesia Project, and the Christian Community Development Association (CCDA), among so many others. Despite his absence in mainstream media, God has not removed himself from the world stage. He is alive and active, moving among his people to produce creative new forms of resistance against the powers of evil. At the same time, he is himself creating new communities that, though imperfect, give us a glimpse of the kingdom that is to come “on earth as it is in heaven.” It is an exciting thing to see.

Tuesday, 26 April 2005

In postcard 5, “Spiritual Tourism" (The Out of Bounds Church? Learning to Create a Community of Faith in a Culture of Change by Steve Taylor) Steve writes that the missional task of the church recognises and respects that being created in the image of God is to have been created with an intrinsic Godward pull. St. Augustine calls it a “restlessness” that only finds its rest in God. Further, he writes: “always the Spirit is in the world…the Spirit is ruach…a wild, primal, and powerful wind.” (p.82). The Spirit is what Philip Sheldrake calls that “risky, wild, profligate side of God.”Key expressions Steve explores include: “movement,” “journey,” “tourism” (great sidebar too by Gerard Kelly on the importance of “rootedness,” “commitment,” “longevity,” and “staying-put” – p. 85), and “navigable space.”

Among a number of important points in this chapter, one that stood out was the implicit recognition and acknowledgement of the prior work of the Spirit in all mission activity and initiative. Mission is God @ work. A work that we join in on. This “prior work” is recognised doctrinally as God’s “effectual call” which corresponds to Paul’s use of the verb, “call” (i.e. God calls, God draws people to himself, and that “call” is effective; God call is efficious inasmuch as it is able to bring about a consoling movement toward God). “To choose God is to realise that you are known and loved in a way surpassing anything we can imagine…” God’s Spirit is “prior;” God’s love is prior (cf. Psalm 139).

In the beginning (Gen.1); always prior; always before – God. God is the primary concern. “But it is not only God; we get included.”

Thursday, 21 April 2005

Margaret Guenther (M.Div., Ph.D.), born in 1929 is an Episcopal priest, wife, mother of three children, grandmother, spiritual director, mentor of spiritual directors, retreat leader, “administrator, lay medical practitioner, scrubber of floors, washer of clothes,” and recently retired [i] professor of Ascetical Theology and Director of the Center for Christian Spirituality at the General Theological Seminary in New York.

Holy Listening, at 146 pages, is an extended and evocative meditation on the experience of spiritual direction written around the metaphors of spiritual director as host, teacher, and midwife. She concludes with a chapter concerning women and spiritual direction

Guenther opens her chapter on the spiritual director as a "midwife" with the text of Jn. 3:1-4 and an evocative quote from Meister Eckhart:

Tend only to the birth in you and you will find all goodness and all consolation, all delight, all being, and all truth. Reject it and you reject goodness and blessing. What comes to you in this birth brings with it pure being and blessing. But what you seek or love outside of this birth will come to nothing, no matter what you will or where you will it.

Eckhart’s “birth in you;” the birth being attended too and accompanied by the spiritual director / midwife is, it seems to me, that process over time whereby we are becoming more fully human, more fully alive in relation to God, self, and those who neighbour us. Christ Jesus, the final adam is being uniquely formed or born in us. This formation of our “true selves”, Jesus, the perfect imago Dei being woven into the fabric of our lives, is a work of the Holy Spirit who hovers over the “stuff” of our re-creation bringing order out of our inner chaos, wholeness out of fragmentation, and freedom out of bondage.[ii] To accompany this growing, this re-birth, as a spiritual director, is in the words of Guenther to catch “a glimpse into the mystery of Creation and Incarnation.” To accompany and attend to this birth is a tremendously humbling privilege. It is a profoundly spiritual and theological experience for both director and directee.

Saturday, 16 April 2005

For it to be different several things have to happen. One is that the leaders have to learn to sit lighter to their own agenda's and that will mean learning to understand their own motivations and drivers and how to disinvest emotional energy from their own good ideas. It's not easy but it can be done. There is an ideological side to it too: we need to get out of the idea that leadership is about having the inspiritation and persuading people to follow. This means a real,true, recovery in confidence in the idea that God speaks to the congregation and that God speaks to the leaders but that neither will have the whole picture. In turn this means learning the arts of corproate listening; listeing to the hopes and fears of the people individually and corporately, listening to the history, listening to the 'angel' of the church. It is corporate spiritual direction.

Friday, 15 April 2005

Kathryn, my wife, writes on the edge of page 54, “Labor and birth are unique to each person [so too are the movements of God in a persons life, God’s movement within their reflection, imagination, feelings, and discernment. This is also true of churches]. No two are the same. Each needs to be traveled through and approached differently [as is the journey of each person, of each community of Jesus-followers i.e. “church.” A good spiritual director recognises and holds this reality very gently, very respectfully]. The midwife [Pastor as Spiritual Director or accompanier] needs patience to allow the labor to unfold and progress [It takes patience on the part of Spiritual Directors and congregations to “sit with” the ‘labor’ of discernment; of listening, watching, and waiting for new life, new direction, new invitations to emerge]. Allowing labor to unfold naturally without pressure allows the woman to release endorphins (natural pain relief) into the bloodstream. Trying to rush, pressure, or force the mother [church, individual directee] into a situation she is not comfortable with may slow, or even stop labor.” (* bold text is Kathryn’s)

Author and Spiritual Director, Margaret Guenther (in her excellent book, Holy Listening: The Art of Spiritual Direction, suggests that our story, our journey is “punctuated by stories of pregnancy and birth, stories of new life that redirect and transform…” The literal meaning of the term “midwife” is “with-woman,” so pastor as “midwife” implies one who is deeply with, deeply attentive, deeply present to the movements of God and the possibilities of new life, change, and growth within a communal (and individual) context. She or he is “the person who is with the birth-giver.” In other words, it is not the pastor-midwife, who gives birth; rather it is the congregation, companions on the Jesus-way.

Thursday, 14 April 2005

Yesterday, on retreat, we spent an hour looking at, reflecting on, and responding to our experiences in relation to old and contemporary images of The Crucifixion (images included paintings by Reuben, Michelangelo, crucifixes, sculptures, and my favourite, The San Damiano Crossfrom the 12th century).

My written response to my feelings and response to the images included the following poem (of sorts) / prayer. I had to report back on my reflection to a Spiritual director and a fellow student. The thing that struck me and them was that I read the poem too fast. I wanted to read it again much more slowly. The others did too, so I did, and so many of the very short sentences came “alive” in really different ways, just as a result of a different emphasis here and there in saying them aloud slowly.

I was interested in my movement from the “ascension” at the top of the San Damiano Cross to my being held by the “ascended” Jesus.

Tuesday, 12 April 2005

Sadly, the book I believe to be most helpful in enabling us to understand the role of Ignatian discernment (previously posted about here) in a communal setting is out of print. It is titled Spiritual Intimacy and Community by John English SJ. (Published in 1992 by DLT in the UK and Paulist Press in the USA).

I reference a book when talking about Ignatian discernment in a communal (read “church”) context because I have not experienced a church community that uses this approach as a way of demonstrably affirming the ministry and priesthood of all believers and of affirming the value of each persons experience of God in the life of the church. I’m working with Ignatian Spirituality and discernment at a personal level but I cannot speak from any experience of this process within a church context.

Pastor as Spiritual Director or one who accompanies and other or others is an important and much needed leadership practice. Prayer coupled with congregational discernment and it’s foundation in Ignatian Spirituality would be an important “practice” (to use the term my good friend Chris Erdman uses) that I would focus a year on if I was a church Pastor / Priest.

To talk of a pastor as a spiritual director is to talk of one who enables and helps a congregation to discover God in their experiences of being the people of God. He or she is one who helps a congregation read their experiences and hear in those experiences God’s invitation to become, and/or to be, and/or to do… [Fill in the blank]. She or he is one who helps and encourages a congregation to enter into the adventure and excitement of both encountering God and choosing to orientate themselves toward the deepening, consoling, freeing, and healing of their experiences of God, themselves, each other, and their world.

Monday, 11 April 2005

This week I am completing a first 5-day non-residential and essentially Ignatian (i.e. drawing on the Spiritual exercises and learning of St. Ignatius of Loyola) retreat as part of the Spiritual Directors training program I am a part of for 2005/2006. I would value your prayers, as and if you feel lead to pray.

Below is a quote from Gerard W. Hughes SJ (‘Society of Jesus, i.e. a Jesuit) taken from his book God, Where Are You? It beautifully captures one of my central motivations for participating in this course.

“…I can only come to know you [God] in and through my own experience. You are in every moment…You were there when I was being knitted together in my mother’s womb. You are always there, giving me breath and bread, in every person I encounter, in every step I take, waking or sleeping You are there. But I am short-sighted to the point of blindness. Physically You have blessed me with good eyesight…but the blindness that afflicts me is a blindness of soul…

By blindness of soul I mean all those attitudes of mind and heart, ways of acting and reacting, which are not anchored in you, my hearts longing, my destination [To have ignored my destination would have been to have lived my life in blindness]. I may speak Your name, preach and lecture in religion and spirituality, and mean what I say, but my words and thoughts can be proceeding from one level of consciousness, while inner thoughts and aspirations, longing and fears, are proceeding from another deeper but conflicting level, centered on my kingdom, not on Yours, and unconsciously influencing the things I do and do not do...

Sunday, 10 April 2005

Alan Jamieson is visiting Hamilton on the 28th and 29th May. I’m registered for his Saturday seminar / workshop, and hope to get to the lecture he his delivering on the Friday evening.

Alan Jamieson researched and wrote his PhD under the title: A Churchless Faith: Faith Outside the Evangelical Pentecostal / Charismatic Church of New Zealand. He has subsequently written two excellent and very very useful titles – A Churchless Faith (Feb. 2002) and Journeying in Faith(Feb. 2004).

Two dimensions of Alan’ writing in particular interest me – his work around faith development (how we enable and resource growth and spiritual formation within our church communities) and also around post church groups. On the latter subject I had reason during the week to offer some suggestions with regards to questions I’d like to ask Alan. I list them below:

I’m looking forward to meeting him.

Listening at the edges of church belonging – “…a majority of church leavers do so because church is squashing the life out of them. Church, it seems, fits increasing numbers as comfortably as a straitjacket and over time it chafes and binds so much that people can no longer stand it. Those of us contentedly attending our church week-in, week-out need to hear these disillusioned voices. But more than that we need to listen for them in our churches (they are certainly there, somewhere)…”

Saturday, 09 April 2005

The wonderful focus on missional leadership and congregational change provided by my good friend Chris Erdman, and Alan Roxburgh continues here [and now here. Chris has added another post, here, while I’ve been typing this, here on the other side of the Pacific] with Alan’s response to a question that I asked. Previous posts in this latest conversation are here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. Thanks Chris and Alan; there’s so much I want to interact with in conversation and especially practice.

If you haven’t read Alan’s essay (at all, or recently), Missional Leadership: Equipping God’s People for Mission, have a read/re-read. It’s really useful stuff. For me it has re-shaped my understanding of the role of church leadership and helped me rethink my ecclesiology. It has enriched by understanding of church, gospel, and culture, and in the process woven together some older notions that have long interested me. You’ll find the essay in the book: Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America

Alan’s would be a great essay to read within a congregation and particularly by a leadership team. Read it. Talk about it. Sit with it. Pray. See where the Spirit might be leading in terms of practical responses in your unique context.